Stakeholders get lowdown at Smart Hooky event

Representatives from four DNO’s, along with the Centre for Sustainability and the Open University, came along to the latest industry stakeholder engagement event for Low Carbon Network Fund (LCNF) project Smart Hooky, held at the Hook Norton Brewery, but on this occasion the attendees were sampling what the project had to offer rather than the usual hops and barley you’d expect from such a venue.



The purpose of Smart Hooky is to help customer’s better understand their energy usage via an energy web portal, which went live in March, along with providing WPD with added visibility and knowledge of the low voltage infrastructure.


 

The customers’ usage is monitored via load monitoring nodes, which send signals via mains cables to the substation, known as Power Line Carrier technology (PLC). The substation monitoring equipment then collates the data. The monitoring nodes show how much power they use and when, allowing for comparisons with their fellow neighbours. The National Energy  Foundation, one of the project partners, will then advise customers on how to reduce their energy consumption. “This project has given some very interesting results in terms of customer usage, and it has shown that the technology works,” said Steve Burns, Innovation and Low Carbon Engineer.

He added: "We shared our findings so far and explained how the substation monitoring equipment and PLC works to help us better understand the low voltage network, and were able to take them out to a substation to show it in action. There was also a workshop in the afternoon to get industry stakeholders’ thoughts on how we can best interact with customers."